My name is Bracham Holfeld. I have been called "The Trucker Who Can Read." For the last couple years or so I've been using that reading skill to drop my dependency on big tech and support myself and my family with some of the services that many people don't even think twice of using from big tech, like cloud storage for files including photos, calendars, and contact lists.
Somewhere around 2019/2020, I started looking into Linux. I don't recall what exactly got me started, although it was a combination of wanting to mess around with something that would work well as a server, and a dislike for Windows 10 coming up to the time that support for Windows 7 would end.
Now I have one Windows 7 computer for certain uses, and everything else is Linux. I can't even remember how many different services I have set up on my server, some that I use daily and depend on, others that I think of occasionally when I need them. I only wish I would've started with Linux ten or fifteen or more years ago, instead of only two or so.
Even so, I think I'm doing reasonably well with everything I've started. No, I'm not a hacker, or even a coder. At some point I may get into coding, but so far any time I think of something I want to try, there's an open source Linux program or project doing that very thing! Best of all, much of it is free, so for me doing all this essentially as a hobby, other than some hardware, all that is required is time.
Now take a look around and see if there's something that's helpful to you on your own journey to independence from the mega-tech companies!